“We totally will,” Noah promised. “We’ll be so nice to him.”
“Uh-uh. Not you three,” Aiden said, sweeping his finger from Zane and Felix to Noah. “You three keep your bleeding hearts to yourselves. You just maintain the status quo. I want him to feel better, not have him spend the next six months swimming in your tears.”
“Rude,” Felix muttered.
“Beyond,” Zane agreed.
“Not for nothing, but we did some actual investigating while you guys were off planning gaming tournaments and thinking up creative ways to torture people,” Archer interjected.
“We were keeping two tiny humans alive and working for a living, thank you very much,” Lucas said.
“Not you two,” Archer clarified benevolently.
“And?” Aiden asked when he didn’t elaborate.
“And we found some stuff about Thomas on the internet,” Archer said.
“He’s a billionaire. There’s stuff about all of us on the internet,” Adam said, rolling his eyes.
“No, we were deep,deepinto the internet. Like flat-earthers, 9/11 was a hoax, JFK Jr. is still alive level deep.”
Calliope frowned. “I have spiders crawling all over the darknet. There’s no way I missed a Mulvaney conspiracy theory.”
“Okay, not that deep,” Mac admitted. “But still, we found this really innocuous-looking thread that, on its face, looked like it was about pet-sitting. But deep within those threads are some really weird posts between a number of people talking about murder…and Thomas Mulvaney.”
“Like, killing him?” Noah asked.
“No, like him being a killer. And a hypocrite.”
“Which is ironic because these very same people appear to be serial unalivers themselves,” Archer said.
“Wait, so these people are like vigilantes?” Felix asked.
“Sounds more like something assassins would do,” Zane said.
“No, not vigilantes or assassins. Serial killers. Serial killers were talking about Dad. To each other. Claiming he was one of them,” Archer insisted.
Atticus frowned. “Are you trying to say that there are people on the internet—people who are our usual targets—who know what we do?”
“They didn’t mention us. They only mentioned Thomas,” Mac said.
“So, this is all happening because of an internet conspiracy theory where Thomas is a serial killer?” Calliope asked, looking shook.
“No,” Archer said. “Well, I don’t know precisely, but it seems like this person who calls themselves…what was it?”
Mac reached for his phone, opening up his memo app. “ALWAYSCHRISTMAS1225.”
“Yeah, that. Was trying to use this group of killers to crowdsource information about Thomas’s extracurricular activities.”
“Did they ever find anything?”
“Not sure. The thread died three years ago, and we couldn’t find any trace of these people anywhere else on the net,” Mac said.
“Always Christmas…as in Holly?” Noah asked.
“But Holly’s dead.”
“But what if she had a kid?”
